Adam Smith wanted government to stop meddling in markets, but he did not advocate unrestrained competition. No man might violate the laws of justice, and by that he meant that none might indulge in fraud or use force. These laws were to be enforced by government, protecting each member of society from oppression by others…. read more »
The major ideologies, outlined on the facing page, have developed through history. Each of them provides the conditions which permit the next one to emerge, and each of them has fewer people attached to it than the one before. The diagram below indicates the outcome, the ideological structure of contemporary society, but the model needs… read more »
(Revision of September 1992) IDEOLOGICAL COMMENTARY announces itself as a journal of systematic ideology (s.i.), but it does not claim final knowledge of this theory; the formulation that looked like the ultimate last month needs alteration now, and the account given here undergoes continuing revision. S.I. starts from observation of the limited success achieved alike… read more »
Attendance at lecture-and-discussion meetings of this party often turns out less of a penance than might have been expected. Sometimes a plodding repetition of the same narrow arguments reveals unimagined vistas of boredom, but other speakers display a wit, and rhetorical ability, that turn the occasion into entertainment; one of them used to define truth… read more »
Systematic ideology posits an ideological system in constant change. Different parts of it change at different rates, and for most social purposes its overall form can be taken as stable, but no part of it is permanently fixed and neither is the whole. Studies of particular parts of the system often assume a static condition,… read more »
Reviewed by Jonathan Simcock in Freedom 17 April. George Walford has contributed articles on anarchism and related issues to both Freedom and The Raven, and regularly features in Freedom‘s correspondence columns. Much of his arguments and ideas in these pieces derive from his exposition of ‘systematic ideology,’ which attempts to examine and explain ‘ideology’ and… read more »
Anarchists themselves recognise divisions within the movement, and the greatest of these occurs between the (Anarcho)-Socialist Party of Great Britain (both sections) on the one hand and the other anarchist groups and organisations on the other. Of these, the (A)-SPGB displays the purer repudiation, declaring the futility of attempts to reform capitalism and refusing to… read more »
Neither rulers nor ruling classes impose the political structure; it grows from the ideological system, it is an attempt to provide formal expression for power-relations between the groups attached to the various major ideologies. Once this has been recognised, the development of democracy begins to appear in a different light. Commonly seen as according progressively… read more »
Sir, I think that all Stirner means is ‘That it is not a good thing to tell the truth all the time.’ I think Kant would agree with that. Yours etc. Isaac Barr Sir, I will accept your injunction not to discuss, for the time being, the issues raised so far in the debate on… read more »
‘Science, it may be said by those who are not scientists, deals in objective truth. But the scientists themselves do not see their work that way. They see it as dealing not with objective truth but with convenient fictions that are upheld so long as they continue to be useful.’ (Bailey, F. G. 1991 The… read more »